Dowd: It's Hillary in 2008

NewsMax ^ | 10/3/02 | Limbacher

[RLK]

First off, as far as talent and brains go, I would stack our people up against theirs anytime.

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That must be why our people lose elections and can't even refute Bill and Hillary's and Carvilles assertions protecting them in matters such as Lewinsky, Jones, and Juanita Broaddrick.

[RLK]

Look, the fact is, the name of the game is to sieze the center and hold it.

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That is the great assertion by the stupid and the great myth supported by the radical left. Every time the Republicans and other people move to the center and adapt to it, the radical left moves their monologue farther left. This produces a new average political position and a new center. As a result of the ridiculous accomodation you and the other intellectually challenged and gutless believe in, the center is moving leftward with the speed of light A speeding bullet couldn't catch up with it, let alone hold it. Thanks to people such as yourself the "center" is farther left than Norman Thomas was 45 years ago.

Pal, I don't believe I need you as a political theoretician. Your mindlessness is killing this nation.

[desertcry]

Republicans will not know how to run against her Please don't underestimate W, and his political Brain trusts. I say, let the witch run, and make W's day. NY, and california is not all of USA, thank God.

[Republic]

That would be a very interesting ticket. Ford has been rewriting his script lately and appearing oh so conciliatory and statesmanlike. Hillary is hiding, like she does whenever the going gets tense. Is there one person out there who knows where she stands on Iraq? Dowd guesses she will support the Pres is she sees the majority in the senate doing so...but where is she now? Where is her backbone to come out and state her beliefs RIGHT NOW? I don't want anyone running for President who hides like this creep does, who avoids unscripted interviews, who is AFRAID of Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly because she KNOWS she will be confronted, who stands in OUR SENATE and hold up a newspaper that states BUSH KNEW (about Sept 11 before it happened)!! Disgusting. And she continues to stay married to a pig who criticizes OUR PRESIDENT while on foreign shores. She has proven she has no heart-billy dale, the hit and run of the guard during the campaign, the one who went to the hospital he was so injured, but who hillary could NOT get out of the car and tend to...HORRID!) and now we know she has no soul.....she is willing to stay married to a pig for personal gain.

[ConservativeDude]

this is an important topic. hillary will win in '08 unless we take a bold move.

rice must become S of state or defense first in order to carry the banner. that is more of a qualification than being a senator.

but let's do think beyond that. how about bill owens in co? he could be good. and he (a true conservative) beat a wildly popular and left of center woman who was a sitting lt. guv a few years back to take the governor's office in a swing state. he knows how to beat a woman candidate.

Frist may not be exciting. but i personally think that many Americans would like to elect the first physician. i think that could be a powerful point. he at least would be a great VP.

i generally agree on the others. i sure like Largent, but I fear he may not have presidential stature or even ambition. he could probably win WA state, and that's worth something in an evenly divided electorate.

but back to rice. she effectively negates the point that the pubs won't know how to run against hillary, already pointed out, and that is all true.

she might be our only hope.

and remember, as much as we loathe her, america is in love with hillary.

if we don't throw deep, she could very well win and win big in 08.

[desertcry]

Republicans will not know how to run against her Please don't underestimate W, and his political Brain trusts. I say, let the witch run, and make W's day. NY, and california is not all of USA, thank God. Oh sorry, dowd did say 2008. But it doesn't matter all of W's BRAIN TRUSTs, I'm sure will have great say on how the Republican party will be run in 2008 .

[breakem]

Imagine Hillary being the president the last year. On second thought...........

[desertcry]

Republicans will not know how to run against her Please don't underestimate W, and his political Brain trusts. I say, let the witch run, and make W's day. NY, and california is not all of USA, thank God. Oh sorry, dowd did say 2008. But it doesn't matter all of W's BRAIN TRUSTs, I'm sure will have great say on how the Republican party will be run in 2008 .

[RLK]

like a torturer studies sensitive nerve centers in an anatomy class.

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That should be the quote of the week.

Early in her campaign Hillary defiantly touched every raw nerve in the population. People sputtered in anger for a while, wore themselves out in rage, collapsed in resignation, then voted for her. When she kissed Mrs. Arafat her poll numbers with the critical Jewish vote fell to nothing. It was said she could never win the election. On election day the Jews shuffled slump-shouldered like inmates of a concentration camp to the ballot box to the ballot box to put her into office.

Bubba did the same thing with the Jones Lewinsky affair. The country was enraged for a couple months, then collapsed as he broke the people. Now he acting president and the toast of four continents for $300,000 a night paid by the warped mentalities he manipulated and created. Clucks here on this forum refuse to understand what happened. Many of them are just too stupid to do so. That's as kind as I can be.

[RLK]

OK, where is the barf alert! I don't see one! If that ugly woman becomes president, I'm movin to Siberia!

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You won't need to. She'll move Siberia here into the part of the country Bush hasn't given to Mexico.

[RLK]

Please don't underestimate W, and his political Brain trusts. ..

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Right. This is the same guy who blew an initial 15 point lead in the polls and wound up losing the polular vote to an idiot like Owlgore. The only thing Bush has going for him is 9/11 and a war causing people to gather around him. If that peters out, Hillary will walk over him. On 9/10 his [public support was crummy and his presidency was failing.

[Bush2000]

Hillary Clinton is the great White (House) hope of American womanhood, and in 2008 she'll be swept into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd declares

Bwahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!

Only if there's a coup d'etat. America will not elevate Hillary Clinton to the presidency. She may have fooled New York but she can't fool the heartland.

[desertcry]

.....Hillary will walk over him Yeah right, you wish. You wait and see, when all those millions of $$$$ for pardons, illegal contributions,.... ala the Torch hits the fan.

[RLK]

.....Hillary will walk over him Yeah right, you wish. You wait and see, when all those millions of $$$$ for pardons, illegal contributions,.... ala the Torch hits the fan.

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You seem completely incapable of learning from experience. All those so-called scandals have been known for years and didn't affect the Clintons one bit. Hillary simply declares them to be old business attempted to be kept alive by a right wing conspiracy, laughs, then walks off with media support. The people crumble and adapt to it. It's a pattern Hillary has been making work in her and bubba's favor for years.

When are you going to cease seeing only what you want to see and begin living in the real empirical world? Stop the kid stuff. You and people like you are dangerous.

[desertcry]

You, and people like you are dangerous HA! HA! HA! My sides hurt, thanks for the big laugh! You should be earning your living in LALA land, they need comedians like you and BS. Enough laughing for today, it's tiresome after a while.

[Mortimer Snavely]

"When are you going to cease seeing only what you want to see and begin living in the real empirical world? Stop the kid stuff."

I'm entirely convinced that "truth" in many, many, conservative circles is socially determined. A major component of this mentality is a weird hyper-optimism which assesses empirical data solely on its value to a group-think pep rally.

Huey Long would have had a field day with a lot of these folks, convincing them that his "Share the Wealth" scheme was the epitome of American conservatism. Any number of credentialed Evangelical ministers would leap at the opportunity to be his proselyzers.

[section9]

That is the great assertion by the stupid and the great myth supported by the radical left. Every time the Republicans and other people move to the center and adapt to it, the radical left moves their monologue farther left. This produces a new average political position and a new center. As a result of the ridiculous accomodation you and the other intellectually challenged and gutless believe in, the center is moving leftward with the speed of light A speeding bullet couldn't catch up with it, let alone hold it. Thanks to people such as yourself the "center" is farther left than Norman Thomas was 45 years ago.

Pal, I don't believe I need you as a political theoretician. Your mindlessness is killing this nation.

Normally, one would hope that one could have a decent conversation with the likes of you. However, so closed and narrow is your mind, that all you can dream up, at the end of the day, is a pathetic attempt at ad hominem.

Now let's see if we can do this again, shall we?

It is often times that I sit in wry amusement at the eternal stupidity of some conservatives.

People like Buchanan. People like Alan Keyes. People such as yourself.

I recall a post by the Common Tator once who indicated that "my way or the highway" conservatives would always lose, and would always deserve to lose, simply because they mistook tactical flexibility for abandonment of principle.

Sadly, you are such a person. You lose. You wonder why you lose. You bay at the world and wonder why you keep losing to Democrats. So, you do what all losers do. You blame the electorate. You tilt at windmills. You go back and read A Republic, Not an Empire for the twelfth time, as if that will change anything. When it won't.

And you forget why Ronald Reagan won.

Now I'm going to try to be patient with you and bring you along. Slowly. Painfully slowly, sad to say. But surely, nonetheless.

Whether you like it or not, American politics today is governed by a certain political truth: about a third of the people identify themselves as Republicans; about a third as Democrats; and about a third of the people identify themselves as independents. Political contests in America are all about getting those independents to vote for your guy.

Democrats have been good at getting independents to vote for them in recent years because they had a candidate in Bill Clinton who could connect with audiences, especially across the medium of television, and convince those in the center that Democrats were:
a. not going to raid their pocketbooks.
b. in favor of "traditional values".

Now the former was a baldfaced lie, of course, but it took a baldfaced liar such as Clinton to bring it off.

How and ever, the latter is where Clinton succeeded brilliantly, because he was able to define "traditional values" on his terms: "school uniforms", "national health care", "protecting the environment", and so on.

Clinton was extremely lucky in that the bin Ladenists were only beginning to rouse themselves during his two terms and the economy promised nothing but blue skies ahead.

He captured the center and held it through two election cycles. The only time he lost it was in 1994. But unfortunately, our leadership at the time had no tactical flexibility. Newt Gingrich thought of himself as another Boss Cannon. Clinton waited for Gingrich to overreach himself and believe in his own b.s.. Clinton would not be disappointed, and we have been fighting a rearguard action in the House ever since.

The 1995 budget battle is instructive. It's a perfect illustration of what happens when folks such as you dominate the Republican Party.

Gingrich set a marker down and insisted that no continuing resolutions would be passed unless certain of his demands were met. It was Gingrich's way, or the highway. Gingrich was right, of course, on principle. One of the things Gingrich was trying to do was to get Clinton to get serious about Medicare and Social Security reform. Clinton was not a serious man in this regard: he wanted the issues around for the 1996 campaign. But when he refused to pass a continuing resolution, he handed the political initiative over to Clinton.

Who promptly seized the center, and held it, through the 1996 campaign.

Now you may not like this. This may be unpleasant to you. But this is the truth, as it happened. He who holds his base and takes the center wins the battle. Clinton did just this.

Theoretically, you argue that moving to the center as an electoral tactic merely cedes the ground to the Left as the Left moves the goalpoasts in the fullness of time. Aside from your personal invective against me, which served no purpose, and I might add, did not serve your argument, I believe that your argument is intellectually defensible in policy terms. However, you strike me as a defeatist, when you have no reason to be.

I would argue that we on the Right have been able to set many of the terms of the debate in the past twenty years:

The Reagan tax relief package was never repealed, not even by Clinton. In 1993, he only marginally adjusted the higher end brackets to satisfy his base that he was "soaking the rich". That was most of the Clinton tax increase. The sum and body of Reagan's tax cut has never been repealed.

Reagan understood, as you apparently do not, that politics is about coalition building: addition. You can take great and abiding principles as your core: low taxes, opposition to Soviet Communism, a belief in the right to keep and bear arms, and a belief in the right to life, and build a coalition of like-minded people around your position.

Reagan built a new center. But he did it without drumming "deviationists" out of the party. For instance, Reagan did not kick out the pro-choice Republicans. He was frank about his pro-life stance, and kept the Human Life Amendment in the Platform, but he did not purge the party. He needed all those pro-choice Republican women in 1980 and 1984. They were attracted to Reagan's vision of lower taxes and Reagan's natural optimism.

Conservatives must argue from Conservative principles, that is true. They must never hesitate to reach out to the center to win, however. Politics is about winning. You don't win, you don't get to govern. And under our system, you don't get to pick Supreme Court Justices.

Part of your problem is that you are trying to argue against the great historical current of the Twentieth Century: an increase in state power at the expense of individual liberty. Two great things occured, however: fascism and communism were defeated decisively. I would argue that the fact that large, statist solutions to social problems are only now starting to run out of steam. For example, the slow collapse of the Canadian Health Care system, or Britain's inability to make the NHS work, are two examples of what is going on. Another example of a current away from the Left is what is happening in Russia. Putin has introduced a ten percent across the board flat tax in Russia. The early results are promising, as tax receipts have gone up and ordinary Russians are pulling rubles out from under the mattresses. The Left has been in an intellectual retreat since the fall of Soviet Communism.

You're seeing the glass as half-empty, I'm seeing it as half-full. Therein lies the difference. But further, you're confusing tactical flexibility in an election campaign with abandonment of principle, and that is not always the case. What is important to understand is that in an election campaign, both sides compromise to build the largest coalition. That's how you win.

Whether you agree with me or not is rather irrelevant.

Be Seeing You,

Chris

[RLK]

. It's a perfect illustration of what happens when folks such as you dominate the Republican Party.

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I havent dominated anything for yrars. I knew Bush Senior was a loser in 1988 and would result in a leftist victory later on. Nobody listened then any more than you are now. I knew Dole was a loser in 96. Nobody listened to me then any more than you are listening to me now. I said Hillary was running one of the shrewdest senatate campaigns I had ever seen when she started on her listening tour. People lauged at me and nobody listened to me any more than you are listening now. I see her doing the same thing now. Is there any reason to believe me now? Not when I'm dealing with high school kid mentalities who know everything.